The hacker is back – In February 2022, the bridge wormholes link Solana to other blockchains that collapsed in a sensational hack. Indeed, the attacker had managed to steal 326 million dollars. This makes this attack the fifth largest in DeFi to date.
Already a year and 326 million still missing in Wormhole
Wormhole is a bridge protocol that allows funds to be sent between blockchains Solana (G) And Ethereum (ETH). Almost a year ago, on February 2, 2022, it was the target of a rare attack. In total, the attacker stole 326 million dollars. At the time of events, it was the second largest attack since the creation of the DeFi ecosystem.
As a reminder, the forward would take advantage of a lack of verification in the smart contracts of the protocol. Without going into too much detail, this lack of verification when using certain functions allowed him to use fraudulent parameters, without the smart contract activating any security.
Result of the races: the attacker managed to mint thousands of wETH. Later, he quickly moved them to Ethereum, emptying all the pools on the bridge. Fortunately, the Wormhole Bridge was quickly saved by Jump Crypto who saved the 120,000 ETH stolen the day after the bombing.
>> Worried about scams and hacks? Ledger has the solution (commercial link) <
The Wormhole Thief is back in the game
For almost a year, the attacker’s address recorded almost no activity. However, as of January 14, the hacker appears to have resumed service. Indeed, this has deposited 1,888 ETH on one of these addresses, on January 23rd around 7pm. Later, he used these funds on various DeFi protocols.
At first, the attacker converted his own ETH versus wstETH. He then used these funds to borrow 13 million DAI. Once the DAI is in his possession, he has it traded for more stETHa tokenized version of an Ethereum staking deposit.
He then repeated the process several times in what is called a leverage cycle. Therefore, the hacker currently has 71,400 wstETHthis is 128 million dollars staked on Ethereum.
At the same time, on the Solana blockchain, the offender has committed to sell all the SOLs in his possession per lot of 30,000.
For their part, faced with this activity, the Wormhole teams tried to communicate with the attacker. The latter offered him, once again, a Reward of 10 million dollars in exchange for the return of funds.
The Wormhole Hacker Behind the BNB Bridge Hack?
After analyzing the actions taken by the attacker in the past few hours, some Internet users have had a feeling of deja vu. Indeed, how declared by @Spreekaway on Twitter, Actions made by the Wormhole hacker are strangely similar to those performed by BNB bridge hackers.
Indeed, on December 23, the BNB bridge hacker converted part of his funds into liquid staking tokens to deposit the stolen ETH in staking.
Recently, North Korean hackers from the Lazarus group they are committed to launder funds from the Harmony Bridge hack. In total, 64 million dollars into ETH have been moved.
Do you need a secure wallet to explore the multiple applications of DeFi? the best solution is still a personal hardware wallet. To the ledger, there is something for all profiles and all cryptocurrencies. Don’t wait to secure your capital (trade link)!